Tiny Buddha

Tag: thin

  • How I Am Learning to Trust My Body More and Control It Less

    How I Am Learning to Trust My Body More and Control It Less

    “I’m a beautiful mess of contradiction, a chaotic display of imperfection.” ~Sai Marie Johnson

    I don’t identify as having an eating disorder. I don’t struggle with anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating.  Yet I exercise precise control of my weight, down to the pound. If I gain a mere two pounds, I can feel it. First in my stomach. Then in my face.

    That’s when the self-loathing kicks in.

    I beat myself up for gaining those two pounds.

    I wear a shirt to sleep at night, instead of being naked like I am when I am two pounds lighter.

    I leave the towel wrapped around me when I get out of the shower, to avoid having to look at my naked body in the mirror.

    I eat only a smoothie for breakfast.

    I go to bed hungry.

    I don’t want to have sex because I don’t feel good in my body.

    I restrict myself from food and pleasure until I lose those two pounds.

    What’s worse is that I desire to lose even more weight.

    Sometimes I google “BMI calculator” and enter my height and weight in the tool. The tool tells me I am a normal weight. I enter a weight several pounds below my actual weight to see what weight I would need to be to be underweight. That weight is 133 pounds.

    I secretly crave to be underweight. Which is why I was so happy when I got food poisoning a few weeks ago and weighed 133 pounds for four days.

    I am disgusted with myself for being happy about this. I was throwing up for two days, was only eating toast, and was extremely weak. Yet I felt happy because I was smaller.

    I didn’t want to return to my normal weight. I wanted to remain small.

    I did slowly regain that weight. I hopped on the scale at the gym yesterday and I weigh 136.8 pounds. “Shit,” I thought. I want to be down to 135 before my wedding in three weeks. I quickly started calculating and felt relieved, knowing it would be easy to lose less than two pounds in three weeks. No problem.

    I’m also disgusted with myself about the amount of time I spend thinking about food and my weight. What did I eat today? Did I have too many pretzels? What will I eat for dinner? Today was my rest day, so I have to eat less. 

    I am slowly becoming aware of how much brain space food and weight take up. I wonder what creativity I could unleash if I devoted less time to thinking about food and more time to brainstorming, dreaming, and problem-solving.

    In addition to all this thinking, I also snack incessantly. Yesterday I counted and I went to the kitchen twelve times to get a tiny snack. A couple of pretzels, a mandarin, a handful of granola, a bite of chocolate, a few blueberries.

    I’m not sure if my constant snacking is due to actual hunger or if it’s connected to a more general anxiety and inability to relax.

    I think it’s both. When I eat a bigger breakfast, I have less desire to snack throughout the day. But I also think there’s an element of anxiety, because I find a moment of calm through the action of putting a bite of something in my mouth. For me this doesn’t show up as over-eating when I’m stressed, it’s more of a daily anxious habit. Perhaps some sort of desire for oral fixation.

    I could go even deeper to say that perhaps I feel like I am missing something in my life and, therefore, try to fill that void with snacks. I’m not sure if that’s the case, because mostly I am pretty happy and content. Yet my snacking behavior could suggest otherwise. Perhaps both things can be true. I can be happy in some ways and still yearn for more.

    I am also assessing my other eating habits. I don’t severely restrict myself from treats. I eat cake when I want to. I eat McDonald’s at the end of a long backpacking trip. I treat myself to an occasional burger. But I don’t enjoy these less healthy foods guilt-free. If I have cake one night, I’ll work out extra hard the next morning. It’s almost like I punish myself for indulging in a treat.

    I’m not sure what’s under my desire to be small. I know some of it comes from messages from society that thin is beautiful, and the insidious design of our culture to distract women with matters of physical appearance, so we have less brain capacity to think about things that really matter. I think it also comes from the positive feedback I receive about how fit I am. As if I’m a better person because I’m thin. I’m not.

    To this last point, I’m making an effort to give more non-appearance compliments to other people. My favorite one to give (and to receive) is: “I love your energy.” Let’s attune more to people’s energy than the size of their waist or definition of their brows or shape of their butt.

    I also know I have perpetuated these unfair beauty standards. I do it under the guise of: “I want people to be healthy.” But I know that thin does not necessarily mean healthy. I know that bigger does not necessarily mean unhealthy. Also, who decided that being healthy is something to strive for?

    Sure, we have a survival instinct, and being strong, mobile, and able to endure will help us survive. But I’m not sure that being healthy is some kind of moral standard. I strive for it for myself, but just like anything else, it’s an individual person’s decision if they want to be healthy, and what healthy means to them.

    Yes, I’m seeing the contradiction here, because I say I strive to be healthy, yet my desire to be underweight doesn’t seem mentally (or physically) healthy. The amount of time I spend thinking about food doesn’t seem healthy either. Which means I am going along with the lie that has been shoved down my throat my entire life: the lie that thin and small is beautiful.

    Of course I know that is not true. Of course I know that a person’s soul is what makes them beautiful. Of course I know that being weak and underweight is not healthy. Yet in some areas of my life, I act as if I don’t know these things.

    I would like to get to a place of trusting and listening to my body. Trusting it when it wants to eat a big burger after a long hike. Trusting it when it wants a piece of cake on a random night. Trusting it when it craves fruits and vegetables. Trusting it when my stomach feels jittery and empty and wants more fuel.

    I would also like to get to a place of not beating myself up if I gain two, three, four, or more pounds. I want to actually believe that I am still beautiful and worthy, no matter what my weight is.

    Wow. It’s weird to write this. Normally I write about my challenges once I’m on the other side of them. After I have unpacked them. But this time I am writing about a challenge right as I am becoming aware of it. Which means I don’t yet have much wisdom for you. But here’s what I do know:

    1. Exercise should be something we do because we love our bodies, not because we want to control them and keep them small.

    Sometimes I do have this relationship with exercise.

    I love being alive, and I do strength and cardio training because I want to be strong and mobile when I’m old. I want to be on this journey of life as long as possible. I do lunges because I want to be able to climb up a mountain and be stopped in my tracks at the beauty of our planet. I run because those endorphins make me feel good.

    Other times, I crank up the incline on the treadmill to punish myself for eating too much popcorn at the movies the night before. Or I try to do all the squats and deadlifts to make my butt rounder. My goal is to release those latter motivations, because those are grounded in control and inadequacy, not love.

    2. Your worth is not connected to your weight.  

    Read that one again. You are talented, strong, and beautiful no matter what your weight is. You can desire to lose weight or gain muscle or strengthen your heart, but doing so gets to be an act of love.

    3. We should stop thinking of indulging as a bad thing.

    To indulge is to allow oneself to enjoy the pleasures of life—eating a sweet fig in June, eating a chocolate croissant just because it tastes good, hugging your partner after being apart for a few days, driving through your neighborhood listening to your favorite song, sitting outside in the sun on a summer day, and sipping your coffee in the morning.

    Life should be pleasurable, and I want us all to indulge more, without guilt.

    4. Get to know your body.

    What I mean by that is not just getting to know how your body looks, but how your body functions.

    One of the most empowering and transformative things for me in the last few years has been learning about my menstrual cycle. Through reading, coaching, talking to my doctor, and being aware of my own body, I know what is happening hormonally each day of my cycle. I am able to pinpoint the day, how I will feel, and what my body will need. And then I (try to) honor what she needs.

    For example, on day seventeen of my cycle I am usually cranky, tired, and hungry. I clear my schedule, sleep more, and eat what I want.

    5. Your relationship with your body might not be black and white.  

    In some ways, I have a healthy relationship with my body. In other ways (as described above), I do not. Both things can be true. I think the goal is to shift toward a place of love and acceptance, and to spend less time thinking about what you look like and more time being aware of how you feel, how you live in alignment with your values, and how you show up for others.

    6. People’s struggles with confidence and self-esteem manifest in many different ways.

    Some people close to me might be surprised to hear about my inner dialogue and complex relationship with food because I look healthy. (And mostly, I think I am healthy.) But it doesn’t mean I don’t fall prey to the social pressures to look a certain way. We all do in some way or another.

    So let’s have grace, empathy, and understanding for each other, and know that we’re all going through stuff, whether it’s visible or not.

  • Thinner is Not Better – Healthy, Connected, and Happy Is

    Thinner is Not Better – Healthy, Connected, and Happy Is

    “Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don’t match our own beliefs about how we should look.” ~Martha Beck

    I have so many women around me right now—friends, mothers, clients that are on a diet—constantly talking about their weight and how their bodies look, struggling with body image.

    I am profoundly sad about the frequency and theme of those discussions.

    At the same time, I deeply get it; it is hard to detach from our conditioning.

    I too struggled with body image at one point in my life, and for a very long time. I suffered from anorexia in my late teens and early twenties. I was skinny as a rail and thought I was not thin enough. I hated the way I looked. I was never perfect enough.

    I controlled my food intake as a way to regain control over my life, as a way to maybe one day be perfect enough that I might feel loved. I almost ended up in the hospital, as my weight impacted my health, physically and mentally. I had no period, no healthy bowel movement. I was so unhappy and depressed. I had no energy.

    The messed-up thing is that the skinnier I looked, the more compliments I received from a lot of people, from family to friends: “You are so slim and gorgeous.” To me, this just validated the way I treated my body—and myself—with control, self-criticism, and harshness.

    Then there were the magazines, showing skinny models, getting so much positive attention. I was obsessed. The more my body looked like those magazine pictures, the better; though I could never quite get to a point where I looked at myself in the mirror and liked what I saw. It was an endless circle of judgment, control, and unhappiness. 

    It took me many years to change the way I saw my body and debunk the standards created by “society” for women.

    For many years I bit my tongue each time I would hear other women around me comparing and judging their body size and shape, repeating the same narrative of needing to lose weight. These conversations felt like an unbearable ringing in my ears, a knot in my stomach, the story in my head of “I am not good enough.”

    I was in the process of creating a new set of standards for myself, of what it was to be a woman in this world, but the old stories were hard to escape and easier to follow because they were the gold standard. I did not have any role models of women out there, younger or older, loving their body just the way it was.

    There was a point, though, when it was just too draining. I noticed that it was not the striving to get to a perfect body that brought me love. What brought me love was being vulnerable, authentic, sharing my inner life, supporting others, having deep talks, being kind with myself and others, and doing the things I loved.

    From then on, I started to soften and release all those standards that had been gifted to me. I allowed myself to be okay with how my body looked, to enjoy food, to enjoy movement, to enjoy my body. I learned to truly love my body, and with that came a different type of respect: I learned to rest when my body was tired. I learned to eat really nourishing food. I learned to move every day in a way that was respectful to my body and that I enjoyed.

    Thinner is not better. Healthy, connected, and happy is.

    Practicing yoga helped me so much in embodying this new belief, and studying neuro-linguistic programming as well.

    The truth is we are “society”—all of us, women and men—which means we are the agents of change. So let’s pause, reflect, and choose new standards. Is this constant need to lose weight healthy or serving anyone?

    There are a few different things to separate and highlight here.

    If your weight negatively impacts your health or your life, if you feel heavy in an unhealthy way and can’t do the activities you’d like to do, that is a different story; and yes, please, take care of your body, through what you think will work best for you: exercise, nutrition, mindset, support.

    Your body is your vessel to experience life, so finding your way to a healthy body is a worthwhile investment. And daily movement and good nutrition will have such a positive impact on your vitality and health, physical and mental, so yes, go for it, with love, softness and kindness—no control, judgment, or harshness.

    But if you feel that your body is strong and healthy, but you don’t like the way it looks… I feel you. I was there. I felt the shame, the discomfort, the sadness, the feeling of not being good enough. Allow yourself to feel this pain. It is okay, and human nature, to feel concerned about your appearance. We all want to be part of the tribe, to be loved and admired.

    But then, ask yourself, is it me that does not like the way my body looks, or is it because of society’s beauty standards? Is it because of all the noise from my friends, constantly talking about weight and looks? Do I want to transmit those standards to the next generation? To my sons? To my daughters? Is it really the most important thing for us women, to look thin and good? Is this story serving us all? Is it love?

    No, it is not love, and it serves no one. Not the women suffering in silence because they believe their body is not slim enough. Not the partners of those women who can’t appreciate their true beauty and fullness. Not the daughters that will believe the same messages and suffer as well. Not the sons that will not know how to recognize beauty in its diverse shapes and forms. Not society as a whole, which will be robbed of having a happy, compassionate, loving, self-confident population.

    So let’s choose differently. Let’s celebrate our different body shapes and weights and strength. Let’s feel good and enjoy life, movement, and food without counting and restricting and denying love to our bodies and selves.

    Let’s stop talking about our weight constantly and find other ways to connect.

    Some might say that I am too slim to really speak about this subject, that I have it easy. This is not quite true. My body has changed so much throughout the years. I went from an ultra-skinny teenager and twenty-year-old with anorexia, to a healthy weight in my thirties, to ups and downs with weight throughout my two pregnancies and breastfeeding journeys. I have seen my body change quite a lot and have been judged for how I looked oh so many times. I have been judged for being skinny, or envied for being slim, and I have been judged for gaining weight.

    Today I am forty-three. My body is not as slim as it used to be. I have a bit of fat around my belly, and my breasts are not as round and firm as they once were, but I feel strong and healthy. And I am SO grateful for my body for enabling me to experience life so far, and for creating life and feeding life, that I don’t want to ever criticize or shame my body again.

    I have learned to love every scar, my stretch marks, my extra skin, because they are the witness of my life, my loves, my years.

    So thank you, body, for everything you allow me to experience.

    The alternative to loving my body—the constant internal criticism and self-doubt—is too draining.

    We, as humans, are society, so let’s change this conditioning. Let’s never transmit this idea of what a woman’s body should look like to our daughters, to our sons. Let’s invent a world where it does not matter what you weigh as long as you feel healthy and good within. Let’s change the chattering from what diet we are on to how our heart is feeling.

    Let’s celebrate bodies, in their diverse beauty and forms.

  • If You Hate Your Body and Think You Need to Fix It…

    If You Hate Your Body and Think You Need to Fix It…

    “That girl was fat, and I hate her.”

    One of my clients said this the other day—about herself. Well, her little girl self. And my heart broke.

    One of the very first things I do with clients is encourage them to practice self-compassion and kindness—just extending themselves the same basic human compassion and kindness that they would anyone else.

    Very much the opposite of what most people who struggle with weight and food are used to. After all, when it comes to our weight and food, we’re programmed with messages like “You just have to want it more, be motivated, build your willpower muscle, try harder, work harder, be better…”

    Perhaps to some, it may sound easy or silly, and it’s hard to understand what the hell kindness and compassion have to do with weight and food struggles when we’re so programmed to believe the opposite.

    Just extending yourself some basic human kindness and compassion really does end up being one of the most important things to do when you’ve struggled with weight and food for a long time. It’s also the hardest, and some struggle more than others with this simple concept.

    Personally, I struggled hard with it when I first started trying.

    I hated myself. I hated and was ashamed of every single thing about me, and didn’t think I deserved any kindness or compassion. But I knew that if I ever wanted to change the way I felt about myself, I had to figure out how to find some.

    So, I started picturing a little girl version of myself when I felt like I needed kindness and compassion. If I couldn’t give it to myself, I’d pull up a mental image of her and direct it that way.

    It worked, and it’s a trick I’ve also been using with clients since.

    But the other day, this woman (like many others) said, “Little girl me was fat… and… I… hate her. How am I supposed to give it to her when I hate her too?”

    It broke my heart, but it didn’t surprise me, and as I think about it, it makes me angry. It makes me angry because this beautiful lady wasn’t born hating herself for a little belly roll. She learned to from our stupidly broken society and has carried that belief around with her every single day since.

    From the time we’re old enough to make any kind of sense out of the world around us, we’re taught that fat is the enemy.

    Mothers have been taking their kids to Weight Watchers meetings with them to get publicly shamed for the number on a scale since they were seven or eight. We’ve been warned “Better not eat that, you don’t want to get fat, do you?” as though it was a fate worse than death, while simultaneously being taught that food fixes everything.

    “What’s wrong honey, you’re sad? Here, have a cookie.”

    “Sore throat? Here, have some ice cream.”

    We’ve watched as weight loss, at any cost, has been rewarded. Those who lose it are treated like royalty—showered with praise, attention, and acceptance, while we watch those who gain get whispered about behind their backs for “letting themselves go.” Or worse, they get openly teased and made fun of to their face—often even by friends and family who supposedly love them and claim to do it out of love and concern.

    Our society has programmed us to believe that fat is the enemy and thin people are somehow better than those who are bigger, through millions of micro (and macro) aggressions over the course of our entire lives.

    And here’s what’s happened as a result:

    Tens of millions of people (big and small) are wasting literally their entire lives desperately trying to “fix” their “fat” problem so they feel more acceptable to the current narrative that size and shape determine human worth.

    And when they put on a pound, they hate themselves.

    It’s all so unbelievably toxic, damaging, and counterproductive, and it fuels the exact “problem” our population is obsessed with trying to “fix.” Because the individuals behind the war we’ve waged on fat, go through their entire life hating and rejecting themselves.

    The stories they tell themselves about themselves end up looking a whole lot like this:

    I’m worthless and unlovable if I’m not skinny.
    I’m a failure if I gain weight.
    I’m useless and stupid.
    I ate bad, so I’m bad.
    I’m such an idiot because I let myself go.
    I’m disgusting and don’t deserve to feel good or be treated well (by myself or others).

    You may be thinking, “Good, how else are they going to get motivated to get their shit together and lose the weight!” You may even follow that thought with the typical “I’m just worried about their health” tripe. (If you still believe that weight loss obsessions are in the “best interest” of public health, pop over here and read this piece).

    Think about those words for a moment and consider how they make you feel. Now think about the impact of hearing them running through your head on autoplay, both consciously and unconsciously, tens of thousands of times a day, every single day, for years or even decades.

    We believe the things we tell ourselves. And if we’re telling ourselves that we’re worthless and unlovable and failures because of extra body fat, we believe those things to be true of who we are at our core, what we’re worth, and more importantly, what we deserve in life.

    And we treat ourselves accordingly.

    That woman I spoke of a minute ago? Like tens of millions of us, she struggles to feel anything but hatred for a little girl who she thought was fat. The little girl who doesn’t even physically exist anymore but is built into the fabric of who she is now and how she feels about herself because she carried those stories, feelings, and beliefs into adulthood.

    So did I. And I’d be willing to bet, so have you. Because we all do.

    So, she doesn’t prioritize herself. She does everything for everyone else, while ignoring what her mind and body need until she has no physical or emotional energy left to do anything. And then, when she can’t seem to muster the energy or willpower to force herself into following someone else’s stupid food rules to “fix” her “weight problem,” she hates and berates herself even more, and the cycle just keeps feeding off itself literally forever.

    No one in the history of mankind has ever thought, “I’m such a worthless failure, I think I’ll do something really nurturing and kind for myself and my body today.”

    That’s not how those stories work. That’s not how the shame they create works because we treat ourselves how we believe we deserve to be treated.

    When we associate our happiness and worth with our weight, weight gain makes us feel less worthy. The less worthy we feel, the less health-promoting behaviors we engage in.

    We don’t move our bodies (unless we decide to “lose weight”) because we don’t prioritize their health. We only care about the things we think we have to do as punishment for weight gain and to “whip them back into shape.” Corporal punishment is literally built right into the way we talk about it. But because we’re treating it as punishment, we can’t stick to it.

    We eat and overeat things that make us feel like garbage (and gain weight) on autopilot, as habit, as punishment, as reward, to numb and soothe, to celebrate, to mourn whether our bodies need or want those things—who cares what our bodies want, anyway, right? We’ve spent decades hating, berating, and learning to not trust those.

    That’s why stories matter. That’s what they have to do with weight. That’s why the entire weight loss industry has become such a friggen joke.

    We have got to stop demonizing and prioritizing weight. We have to.

    Instead, we have to shower ourselves with kindness and compassion. If we hate ourselves too much to consider that, we have to shower a younger version of ourselves with it (just keep going to the youngest version you need to, in order to find a version of you feel compassion for). 

    Kindness and compassion are so heavily built into this process because we cannot change self-punishing behaviors until we stop believing we deserve to be punished.

    If you want to change your weight, health, or the relationship you have with your body or food, you have to change the way you feel about yourself, and you cannot do that while berating yourself with stories of being worthless because of what you ate or what the scale says.

    It’ll just never happen.

    We have to stop rejecting parts of ourselves, since rejection writes those stories in the first place, and start working with the way our brains are wired (changing the thoughts and stories that create the beliefs that drive self-destructive habits and behaviors). And we have to tune into our thoughts and the wisdom of our own bodies with kindness and compassion.

    When we stop focusing on weight and weight loss and instead focus on shedding the stories (and beliefs that cause self-destructive choices), then, and only then, are we able to forever shed physical, and more importantly emotional weight they may have created. It eventually just becomes an effortless side effect.